Hogyan lehet egy író analfabéta?
How Can a Writer Be Illiterate?

Author(s): Mónika Mátay
Subject(s): Cultural history, French Literature, Hungarian Literature, WW II and following years (1940 - 1949), Post-War period (1950 - 1989), Transformation Period (1990 - 2010), History of Antisemitism
Published by: Eötvös Loránd Tudományegyetem, Új-és Jelenkori Egyetemes Történeti Tanszék
Keywords: emigration; language change; childhood trauma; Central European iden-tity;
Summary/Abstract: Agota Kristof (1935–2011) was an internationally recognized writer: she was among the most famous Hungarian intellectuals of her time. Despite her reputation abroad, she received much less attention in her home country. Her life story displays her central European identity. How? The goal of the present study is to answer this question. Kristof left Hungary in 1956 as one of the 200,000 refugees who fled from the Soviet invasion af-ter the fall of the revolution. She settled down in Switzerland where she could not fashion herself in a literary career, but worked in a watch facto-ry for years. She made a name for herself after publishing a novel, The Notebook in 1986. The story reflected on her childhood in Kőszeg, a small town in western Hungary, although it was not an autobiography. It was a story, written in French by a Hungarian writer who used very simplified language to evoke the atmosphere of an overly cruel world during WWII. This world was cruel in the public sector as well as in private life. Where does this extraordinary brutality come from? What distresses Kristof ex-perienced as a child which are echoed in the novel?

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